Too Big To Fail

Impunity has been the norm. The reason there have been no efforts made to criminally investigate is obvious. Former banking regulator and current securities Professor Bill Black told Bill Moyers  that "Timothy Geithner, then Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong."

Have you noticed that things have gotten eerily quiet in the month of October? For those that don’t want to believe that hard times are on the way, they can take comfort in the eerie period of calm that we are experiencing right now. What they don’t realize is that this truly is “the calm before the storm”, and the global economic crisis that is ahead of us is going to be far beyond what most people ever dared to imagine was possible.

In this symposium I literally challenge the audience (of mostly bankers) to tell me what use would the world have for banks in a Blockchain connected world. The response?............... 

In its efforts to prop up the Too Big To Fail banks, the Fed has made keeping your money in a bank a low value proposition.

The entire global financial system is leveraged to the 'Modern Portfolio Theory' concept that stocks and bonds are always anti-correlated. It is impossible to estimate how many trillions of dollars are managed according to the simple 60/40 mantras but let us just assume something north of $1.4 trillion and something south of "more money than God."  However, the truth about the long-term (132-year) historical relationship between stocks and bonds is scary.  The last three decades of extraordinary anti-correlation has been an era of falling rates, globalization, accommodative monetary policy, and very low volatility of CPI. With the global economy now at the zero bound, those days are over.

We would argue the main reason for Blackrock’s attempt to persuade the exchanges to adopt its recommendations on trading halts is that Blackrock itself is inconvenienced by downside volatility. Presumably the company is no stranger to leverage (how else can it squeeze out large returns with a portfolio this large in a ZIRP world?) and is therefore forced to exercise stop loss orders itself when the market declines fast. Such attempts to “regulate” everything, even the price swings markets are allowed to make, are attempts to stem oneself against nature.

The Fed needs to extricate itself from manipulating the financial markets. It needs to end backstopping market liquidity. It must never again print Trillions of new “money” out of thin air. Because so long as the marketplace perceives that the markets are "too big to fail", there will be speculative excess, major securities markets mispricings and Bubble fragilities. No one – average investor or sophisticated financial operator – has a clue as to the degree Fed policies have distorted asset prices.

Never have markets carried so much risk. And never have markets been as vulnerable to an abrupt change in perceptions with regard to central banker competence, effectiveness and capabilities. At the minimum, global markets will function poorly, but risk is now high for a disorderly – Party Crashing - "run" on financial markets, as faith in central banking begins to wane.

Gold in Q3: USD -4.5%, EUR -2.4%, GBP +1.5%, CHF +2.4%, CAD +4.6%. Global stocks fall 5% to 13% - Stocks face worst quarter since 2011 over fears for global economy

"It’s not right to say we’re worse off... If you go back 20 years ago, cars were worse, the air was worse. People didn’t have iPhones." That’s what you get when you ask a billionaire executive from a taxpayer bailed out, unaccountable industry for his thoughts on income inequality.

Just three short years ago, Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane appeared a lone voice of sanity in a world fanatically-religious Keynesian-esque worshippers. Admissions in 2013 (on blowing bubbles) and 2014 (on Too Big To Fail "problems from hell") also gave us pause that maybe someone in charge of central planning might actually do something to return the world to some semblance of rational 'free' markets. We were wrong! Haldane appears to have fully transitioned to the dark side, as The Telegraph reports, he made the case for the "radical" option of supporting the economy with negative interest rates, and even suggested that cash could have to be abolished.

It seems increasingly likely the next Global Financial Meltdown will arise in the FX/currency markets. The core paradox - that central banks can't control both domestic and global FX markets with the same set of policies - cannot be resolved by printing $1 trillion, or even $5 trillion. Printing money to fix one problem leads to another set of problems that are only made worse by additional money-printing.

We're beginning to believe the nation will not be unified behind a common cause when the coming financial eruption unleashes molten lava of chaos, punishing economic distress, civil strife, class warfare, race wars, and ultimately global war. As Strauss and Howe foretold, the establishment (aka corporate fascist military industrial surveillance state) has seen a sequential loss of popular trust as their blatant corruption, sociopathic stranglehold on the levers of power, and unrelenting greed have angered the critical thinking aware citizens of this country. The next leg down in this Greater Depression will sever the remaining trust, disintegrating any remaining support for the existing civic order. What comes next will be heavily dependent upon whether the 5% to 10% of liberty minded believers in the Constitution are able to gain the trust of the masses.

Following our detailing the Comex gold futures to deliverable physical gold ratio that is now north of 200:1, several correspondents noted that "they are probably bluffing...based on JPMorgan's previous lies, the real number is likely significantly higher than 200:1." History tells us that all Ponzi schemes and market interventions fail, and it appears we are on the cusp of a massive failure in the scheme to cover up the truth about the precious metals market.